As a public service to the naturist community, I’ve typed out what the narrator reads in the 1965 naturist film The Raw Ones. Directed by John Lamb and narrated by Ron Gans, the film was one of the best known nudist documentary films, a somewhat popular genre that has been explored by Mark Storey of The Naturist Society in Cinema au Naturel. The Raw Ones is a well-filmed production featuring both male and female naturists playing, jumping, swimming and running in the sun, over a soundtrack of classical music, in uncensored full nudity. I like the analogy implied by the equation of raw with nude: if you’re dressed, you’re cooked. Not only do we use the verb “to dress” sometimes to mean to prepare food, but also if you were to attempt to follow the raw ones, dressed, as they leap and skip and bounce, you’d be cooked alright, or at least steamed!
“Cooked” here would also have the meaning of censored or altered, as in “he cooked the (accounting) books.” The “raw” narration strongly condemns censorship of any kind while tying social nudism very effectively to the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and defended by the United States Supreme Court. The narration also incorporates quotes on nudity and health by heavy-hitters such as Henry David Thoreau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Havelock Ellis, Hugo Black, and even Hugh Hefner. You can watch The Raw Ones here in four parts. I’ve placed the transcription as a separate page on this site; the transcription shows the breaks between one part and another.
Here’s a sampler of some of the quotes:
Rousseau: “Clothes only hinder children’s growth and size and strength, and injure their constitution. Where children are swaddled in clothes, the country swarms with the humpback, the bow-legged, the rickety, and every kind of deformity. Their first feeling of wearing clothes is one of pain and suffering. They find every necessary movement hampered, more miserable than the galley slave. In vain they struggle. They become angry. They cry. Their voice alone is free. Why should they not raise it in complaint?”
Thoreau: “Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Let our mind descend into our body and redeem it, and treat ourselves with ever-increasing respect.”
American Sunbathing Association (today’s AANR): “We believe in the essential wholesomeness of the human body and regard it neither as an object of shame nor a subject for degrading exploitation. We believe that sunlight and air are vital to human life and wellbeing, and that exposure of the entire body to these elements is desirable at such time and at such places as are fitting and proper for the purpose. We believe that we are entitled to enjoy the benefits of such exposure, without interference as long as we do not cause injury to our fellow citizens. Nudism is potentially one of the steps to greater human acceptance and, therefore, human awareness and growth.”
nudescribe 